Real Chicken Soup — Then and Now
Catholics and others have asked from the dawn of consciousness the perennial question of Job, “Why do the innocent suffer?” The question is always poignant. However, it takes a sharp edge when it involves either myself or someone close. Where is God in all this?
The study of theodicy in philosophy is the question of how can we reconcile a God Who tolerates evil? In all honesty, the problem is a perennial one. Again, evil is a mystery, viz., something knowable and unknowable at the very same time!!
We have to remember that our ancestors in the Jesus Movement experienced both the right and the left hand of God in their everyday lives. They experienced the 1000 joys of life (and hopefully, said thanks to God for those blessings). They also experienced the 1000 sorrows of life as well, as they experienced sickness, suffering, disappointments, failures, accidents as well as old age, of loss of relatives and their own decline.
For sure, most Roman participants in the Jesus Movement experienced times when they wondered what it is all about. Most would have been acquainted with the Hebrew Bible Book of Job. Job never lost faith in God, but he came very close to cursing God for all the heartache that he felt. He asked, “We accept good things from YHWH, should we not accept evil as well?” He also stated, “YHWH, the Lord, gives and YHWH, the Lord, takes away. Blessed be the Name of YHWH!” In the end, God seems to brush off the question, “Where were you, Job, when I created the universe? What would you do better?” Job humbly submits, “You win, YHWH”.
In his journeys, St Paul experienced many hardships and difficulties. In 2nd Corinthians, He makes the powerful statement, “We know that all things work for good for those who love God, who are called according to God’s purpose.” In all the grief that we all experience, Paul says “No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through Him Who loved us.”
What faith the Holy Spirit prompted in Paul as he lived in Christ Jesus! Yet, that faith is a free Gift to us all. If we took more seriously what Paul says to us about the closeness of Christ to each of us, our evaluation of life might differ. Our relationship with Christ is a sharing in the victory of His death and Resurrection.
We still experience the cross in our lives. The cross confronts us in a variety of sizes and shapes, in many ways. They involve any kind of negative experience in our lives, whether sickness, disappointment, accident, old age, betrayal, death of a loved one, or whatever. However, as God said to St Paul in another place, “My strength is enough for you.”
It is very difficult to see negative experiences of our lives as situations in which good things can happen out of evil. Yet, Jesus teaches, as does St Paul, that God remains faithful to us in every situation. Hard to believe sometimes!! Still, we worship the God of Life Who can bring life where there was no life. God is the God Who brought life to the aged womb of Elizabeth and the virginal womb of Mary. God is the God of Life Who brought Life from death when Jesus died. With the God of Life, nothing is impossible. Trust JC!
For any Catholic, sometimes, it gets very tough. It is even made more difficult because when times are good, we tend to avoid getting serious about the transcendent horizon and the inner core of Reality that we call God. In addition, we sometimes become control freaks who made our minds up already about how God should be acting, not only in our own lives, but judgmentally, in the lives of others. Still, Christ Jesus challenges us and enables us to say yes to God in the events of our everyday lives.
Then, all hell broke loose for Roman Christians in 64AD. Trying to live life in Christ Jesus in their mundane lives, the Jesus Movement were accused of the crime of “arson and hatred of the human race” when the Jesus Movement was scapegoated for the Great Fire in Rome in July, 64AD. To use an analogy, our Christian ancestors were considered “urban terrorists” and scapegoating paranoia took over. (Do we ever change?)
St Paul tells his original Roman audience (about 55AD, 9 years before the conflagration and us (his Armonk audience today) in our second reading, “If God is with us, then who could be against us? How many of those men, women and children who died for their belief in Jesus after the Great Fire remembered those words? Apparently, more than a few did. St Paul’s letter, with his urgent plea to Roman Christians to trust in God when they experienced difficulties in their own individual lives, helped sustain many of them when they experienced the cataclysmic when, all of a sudden, their little Jesus Movement in Rome with its call to non-violent active engagement was criminalized and persecuted.
If, indeed, there were an large-scale abandonment of faith by Roman Christians in their days of adversity, it would have been an obvious embarrassment to have included the Letter to the Romans in the Christian Bible (aka New Testament). In fact, about 40 years later, another writer to the Romans, St Ignatius of Antioch flattered the Roman Jesus Movement by speaking of their primacy in faith and compassion. Writing about 50 years later to the descendents of the recipients of Paul’s Letter to the Romans, He calls them a community “worthy of honor, raise, success and integrity”; he tells them that they are a community “preeminent in love” a community that has not been jealous, a community that received directives from both Peter and Paul. Apparently, the Jesus Movement survived the assaults upon them and thrived. No doubt that St Paul’s Letter to the Romans was one of the directives about which St Ignatius wrote.
St Paul tells his original Roman audience (about 55AD, 9 years before the conflagration and us (his Armonk audience today) in our second reading, “If God is with us, then who could be against us?” How many of those men, women and children, who died for their belief in Jesus after the Fire, remembered the words?
In the middle of the Tiber adjacent to Trastevere is the Isola Tiburtina. Catholics in Rome have established there a church of the martyrs of the 20th century. In the very venue where Christians paid with their lives 2,000 years ago, Catholics pay tribute to those who still pay the price for faith.
Please God, faith is bolstered by St Paul’s question today, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” When we, ourselves, experience the Paschal Mystery, the process of ascent, descent and transformation, which is always happening, may we always remember the words of St Paul that bolstered so many for 2000 years now. 072411AD jfq
